what Eithne knew ...
Research! All I want to do is find as much information as I can about Florence and the people who lived there 500 years ago. And I keep running into roadblocks. The best information I've found so far is in Italian, and that remains a problem. While I've finally managed to locate the search terms I need to find the tags in modern Italian I'm still returning too many sites. Unfortunately I've found it impossible to weed out the information I don't want without looking at it. The posters seem to supply as many tags as possible so my search returns e.g. a site that is interested in Venetian banking but mentions in passing that the Medici bank was a contemporary. Another problem is that posters seem to be thinking about modern Italy when selecting tags and omit reference to a particular region, then treat the posting as if Milan, Venice, Ferrara, Abruzzi, and Florence shared a perfectly common culture.